There's a version of my story that starts with ambition and discipline and a clear arc from point A to point B.
That's not the true version.
The true version includes a period — a significant, disorienting, not-something-I-talk-about-at-networking-events period — where things stopped working. Where the version of me that had built a career across two continents and multiple companies ran, quietly and then not so quietly, out of fuel.
It wasn't a single event. It was a slow accumulation: the wrong work, for the wrong reasons, in service of a version of success that had never quite felt like mine. And then the collapse of the structure I'd built around that borrowed idea of success.
That collapse, it turned out, was the most valuable professional development I've ever done.
What breakdown actually is
We're very bad at talking about professional and creative breakdown because we frame it as failure. The project that didn't work. The venture that ran out of runway. The career that required a reset. These are framed as things that happened to you — interruptions in what should have been a successful trajectory.
What they almost never are: evidence that you were wrong to try.
What they almost always are: evidence that something in the foundations wasn't right. The role that didn't fit. The organisation that didn't share the values you claimed to share with it. The creative direction that was someone else's rather than yours.
Breakdown is the moment the mismatch becomes undeniable. And undeniable is where everything real starts.
The doorway problem
Doorways are uncomfortable places. You're neither here nor there. You can't go back — the room you came from has already changed, even if you turned around. The room ahead isn't fully visible.
Every genuine reinvention requires time in the doorway. Time when the old identity has stopped fitting and the new one hasn't yet crystallised. Time when you're not the thing you were and not yet the thing you're becoming.
Most people try to sprint through this phase. Get back to solid ground as quickly as possible. Take whatever's available. Build a new structure that looks enough like the old one to feel stable.
I tried this. It worked, temporarily, in the way that putting pressure on an unhealed injury works — until it stops working, usually at a worse time.
The doorway is not the problem. The doorway is where you figure out what you actually want.
What creative truth costs
The creative practice I have now — the work I do, the clients I choose, the problems I care about — is the result of the breakdown, not in spite of it.
Before, I was working in service of competence. I was doing things I was good at, for organisations that valued competence, in roles that rewarded consistent execution. This is a reasonable way to build a career. It is not a way to do work that matters.
The collapse removed the structure that had made it possible to not ask the harder questions. Suddenly I didn't have the role or the organisation to answer for what I was doing. I had only the question: what do I actually want to build, and why?
That question, with nowhere to hide from it, turned out to be generative. The answer wasn't obvious. It took longer than I expected. But it was honest in a way that everything before hadn't been.
The work I do now is the answer to that question.
The thing about creativity and adversity
I've never met a person doing genuinely original creative work who had a clean, uninterrupted trajectory. Not one.
The people making things that matter have almost universally come through something — a failure, a loss, a period of profound uncertainty — that changed what they were willing to say and how they were willing to say it.
This isn't because suffering makes you creative. It's because adversity strips away the performance of creativity — the approved moves, the safe choices, the work designed to not offend anyone — and leaves you with only the things you actually believe.
The work that comes from that place is different. It's less polished, sometimes. Less careful, always. But it's real in a way that audiences can feel, even when they can't name what they're responding to.
What I'd say to someone in the doorway now
Stay longer than you think you should.
Not because there's virtue in suffering, but because the questions you're avoiding by rushing back to structure are probably the ones worth answering.
The career you rebuild on the other side of genuine clarity will be different from the career you had before. More honest, more specific, more yours. It will also be more resilient — because it's built on something you actually understand rather than something you inherited or assumed.
The collapse wasn't the end. It was the renovation.
It turns out some structures need to come down before you can build the right thing.